Straight & Skillern's 204 Favourite Country Dances

Two Hundred & four
Favourite COUNTRY DANCES
Perform'd at Court, Almacks, the Pantheon,
and most Publick Assembly's,
with the newest and best directions for Dancing each.
Set for the Violin, German Flute and Hoboy
VOL: I.


London. Printed for Straight & Skillern. St. Martin's Lane, near Cha**
Where may be had, A complete Vol: of Minuets for the Violin and Harp.d _ _ _ _
published 1775 by Thomas Straight & Thomas Skillern
ABC transcription by John Chambers, March 2014

All the tunes here are in ABC format. If you don't have ABC software, you can CLICK HERE to use a tool that converts the tunes to other formats.
This collection uses a number of special symbols in the dance descriptions:
symtextdescription
--- special text symbols ---
the Old spelling of "the"
then Old spelling of "then"
their Old spelling of "their"
f s This collection uses the old "long s" character, which survives today only as the integral symbol in math. Note that the little horizonal line in 'f' crosses the vertical line; in the long s, the horizontal is only to the left of the vertical line (or missing entirely). The poor quality of some of the printing means that you may have to determine from context which was intended.
--- phrasing symbols ---
symtextdescription
| These symbols are used to mark phrase endings in the dance descriptions. They are used so inconsistently that about all you can say is that they all mark the end of a dance phrase, which usually but not always is the same as the end of a musical "strain".

The transcription scheme is basically to rotate the symbol a quarter turn anti-clockwise, and then use '.', ':' and '|' to roughly match the symbol. Sometimes three dots are used above or below the line(s), either in a straight line or triangle, and '.:' or ':.' is then used.

But none of these details really mean much, due to the inconsistencies in how these symbols are used.

|.
|:
||:
|
.|
.|:
.|.
.|:
.|.
:|
:|.
:||
:||.
:||: